There won’t be a challenging listen anytime soon from millennial metal bands. The best we can hope for is something engaging, because given how neutered the general public is today, most things, “underground” or not, will be geared with mass appeal in mind. When we as seasoned listeners encounter a new metal band we approach their newest release with the hope that they at least have some framework of metal history at hand to draw from in order to at least give their inherently gimped effort a palette of direction that resembles metal. But with that mass appeal looming in the back of the creator’s mind, that history may be utilized as a checklist for social acclaim to adorn empty musical gestures instead of a well to draw inspiration to guide a commanding voice. Those type of Frankenmetal releases are easily dismissed as a series of “Ta-da!” moments wrapped around a rancid kernel, but by blunting the confrontational elements of disjunct pieces you can somewhat pull the wool over the listener’s eyes as if you are more steadfast in your artistic message than you actually are.

Welp, another school shooting is in the books, and this means we begin the cycle of another nationwide emotional meltdown of reactionary liberals over a founding pillar of our “evil” American culture. Since metal heads and metal journalists everywhere are weighing in on this, and since most (all?) of them are too dumb to say anything logical or researched, it once again has fallen on the staff of DMU to be the sole voice of high-IQ reason in the metal world. For despite guns being legal in America for over 200 years (with over 200 being free of school shootings), despite automatics/machine guns being loose on the streets since at least the 1920s (with 70 of those years being free of school shootings), and despite gun ownership being in steep decline the last few decades (despite school shootings being on the rise), liberals everywhere continue to fall for the totalitarian “give up the gun” scam and blame our second amendment for the mass murder of innocent children. While stats clearly prove otherwise, many miss the true root of this tragedy: the individualism our society has been embracing since the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Accept is a band best remembered for their old school song called “Balls to the Wall”, which used to play on the Headbanger’s Ball. Driving my BMV down the Autobahn at 120MPH through the Black Forest, I stopped in Bad Reichenhall. You know how they always have insane amounts of Gummy Bears everywhere in Germany. And then next to them are porno mags and stuff like biker lifestyle mags. Those were where I found out that Accept was still going strong at the time. It never ceases to amaze. This band just keeps hanging around, like a bad STD. Here they are again 20 years later. And they have this new album Rise of Chaos, which sounds like a cross between Sabbath’s Dehumanizer and an Exodus album.

Few places charm the radiant, open soul like the Tobacco Barn. These little additions to Brookshire Brothers stores are the one place in the world where you can buy smokes and beer in an enthusiastic and friendly setting with far more variety than you will find in a liquor store or anything short of an old-fashioned tobacconist.

Beta-male posterboy and alternative rock tragedy Marilyn Manson has been tormented beyond comprehension ever since publicly disrespecting God’s hand-picked ruler of this nation, Donald J. Trump. After filming a music video of in which he beheads a Trump look-alike, Manson has been the perhaps the most decimated victim of the merciless Trump Curse– he was crushed by a stage prop last October, he cut his set short following a complete psycological breakdown while onstage a few days ago, and now he has become the latest victim of leftism’s idol-killing suicide machine: the #metoo movement. In an article featured in The Guardian this morning, tweets were featured of a Chinese actress accusing Manson of both sexually harassing victims and making racist remarks:(more…)

The emasculated remnants of America’s Antifa are at it again! Now mostly regulated to a handful of stay-at-home activists, the boys at Antifa made enough calls to frighten a Manhattan art gallery into canceling a Taake show scheduled for next month. While they likely believed Taake to be a weird performance artist after seeing pictures from that time Hoest’s host broke through his pants, the trust fund kids running (le) poisson rogue (not a typo, they’re apparently too cool for capital letters) were probably scared off by that time Taake wore a swastika in Germany. Or perhaps someone just showed them those legendary dick pics.(more…)

Hipster celebrity and accused tattoo gun rapist Wrest from Leviathan returns with a new sidekick in an attempt to restore some underground credibility. This is a common gimmick used in rap music whenever an artist has faded from the mainstream but wants to continue making money off the young kids consuming the underground’s newest flavors. Unfortunately for Leviathan, they were never respected in the underground and Crawl displays very little potential to make any sort of impact. The split is one twelve minute song from each artist that both manage to be terrible but for very different reasons. Wrest promised “Aural Mizery” and has ironically maintained that promise.

Tower Records and Musicland didn’t seem to have much the other day. So I went by Camelot music instead. I was wearing my old green Slayer demon head shirt. I had built up points at that store, and they gave me a free purple shirt with their logo on it. I hated the shirt and donated it to Goodwill. In the metal section was the cassette soundtrack to Troll 2. I was almost certain this was a mis-categorization. I didn’t have the money to buy it that day and it sold out before I could get my hands on it.

Furious Dutch black metal band Sammath have issued forth a live recording of “Godless” featuring founder/guitarist Jan Kruitwagen on vocals. The band takes a high-intensity old school approach to this track, emphasizing the multitude of death metal and black metal influences on this band, but with technical aptitude making the song flow together in the style of later black metal.

Until now, metal works (albums, EPs, pieces, etc.) have been regarded as products, even by those who would assume anti-commercial postures. Why this is so, why the underground metal community still sees albums as products and so judge them in that light, has to do with the history of metal as arising from the general rock business context. Black Sabbath as the foundational metal band followed this path and they were also the first metal band to sell out, though there never was much to sell out. In any case, they did not really know what they had and quickly devolved into rock-ized (standardized) “improvements” on the gold they had struck at first, instead of exploring those new sounds and ideas regardless of the commercial context, regardless of the business prospects (gigs, deals, etc.). We must understand, however, that the ideal of metal beyond rock, beyond trends and commercialism, only arose with the Mayhem cabal. Their commercial activities, it should be understood, were a means to something greater, as can be seen from the meticulous selection of albums that came under the auspices of Deathlike Silence Productions.